To remain competitive and ensure sustainable growth, it is vital
that every area of your business focuses on customer satisfaction as a
priority.
Chief Customer
Experience Officer, RAKEZ January
5, 2020 Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors
are their own. You're reading
Entrepreneur Middle East, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
It’s common sense, of course - every single
interaction your customers have with your company will influence their opinion
of you, and in turn will influence your brand positively or negatively. That
overall experience will guide the customer’s decision to return
to you and it will improve the likelihood of them providing referrals that will
lead to even more business for your company.
To remain competitive and ensure sustainable
growth, it is therefore vital that every area of your business focuses on
customer satisfaction as a priority. Let’s now take a look at four things
you’ll want to keep in mind when it comes to providing the right experience to
your customers.
1. Map out the customer journey from A-Z
It all starts here. Thinking about your
customer experience isn’t just about the onboarding stage. It’s vital to
consider their journey every step of the way– from start to finish.
So, as a first step, do just that. Identify
the exact journey of your customer– from the prospect stage (when they are not
yet even a customer), to the signup process, through to the first few weeks or
months, and then onwards throughout the entire lifecycle. Map out every
possible touchpoint and ask yourself if you have it all covered to the highest
standards. The best way to do this is to put yourself in the shoes of the
customer and go through the journey yourself. That way you are sure to know
exactly where things are strong and where they could use improvements.
Use your customer’s journey to build a
“customer experience manual” for your employees: Once you are clear on what it takes to deliver
excellence and forge long-lasting customer relationships, ensure all employees
involved in the many customer experience touchpoints
know what their specific responsibilities are. Do build a manual for it, and
wherever possible build it all into the workflow so that it does not even have
to be considered- that is, it simply gets done.
2. Gather and use customer feedback
efficiently
One of the best ways to understand your
customers’ needs and improve their experience is by evaluating the feedback
they give you which, by the way, you need to do on an ongoing basis.
It all starts with mechanisms for collecting
customer feedback, which can be a mix of formal and informal methods. Any type
of interaction between you and your customers can be considered feedback – from
face-to-face structured client satisfaction interviews to a
standard questionnaire sent out by email to analyzing social media comments.
Set things up so that the end result is an actionable report that guides your
company towards a constantly evolving and strengthening customer experience.
Use the feedback to make your company the
strongest in its field: If you use feedback consistently and effectively, you will
likely stand out quite strongly among your competition over the long run. This
is because most companies do not have proper and consistent feedback-gathering
mechanisms in place, and many that do are not, in fact, acting on that
information to improve the customer experience.
3. Drive digitization
In a survey conducted by the Harvard
Business Review focusing on customer relationships, 72% of respondents
feel that digitization will strengthen ties between company and consumer.
It is no doubt the responsibility of
corporations to utilize digital to improve the customer experience. Here, there
are endless scenarios, such as the use of live chat to get quick answers to
your website visitors, or easing opportunities for customers to provide
feedback in digital format (be it a complaint or just a general overall rating
of your service), or using customer experience management software to channel
feedback to the right department and provide reporting to senior management on
how issues are being handled, and so on. There are tools for just about
anything nowadays, and it is more about putting the right ones in place for
your particular company needs and then ensuring they are actually being used in
a proper way.
Taking it a step further, digitization can
also be about building custom platforms that enable prospects and clients to
have round-the-clock access to your products and services and to advanced customer support that makes the
experience as easy and convenient as possible. If your customers would benefit
from being in touch with one another –for example, to trade advice or to
exchange products amongst each other– you can even build a digital framework to
cater to such needs. There are essentially endless possibilities, and the
solutions you build should be guided by what will best impact your business
growth.
Use digitization to improve and even expand
your offering: The bigger the
company, the more complex these systems –and their maintenance– become.
Regardless of company size, however, it is worth the effort to make digital
part of your game plan. Remember that digitization offers not just room for
efficiencies and an overall better customer experience, but an opportunity to
expand your offering through technical innovation that can help grow your top
and bottom line.
4. Make customer-centricity part of your
company culture and give it a purpose
Customer experience isn’t exclusive to your
sales and customer service teams. It needs to be a priority for the entire
company– from the C-suite to the ground floor. In other words, customer
centricity needs to be an intrinsic part of your corporate culture.
Make it “purpose-focused” and you’ll be guided
by the right strategy. To be clear, you’ll want to have an overall
customer-centricity focus that “services the company by serving the customer
experience”. What is the point of improved customer experience after all? It is
about building a better, bigger and more profitable company. These pursuits are
never-ending ones in the corporate world.
If you haven’t already done so, you’ll need to
develop a blueprint that defines your company’s philosophy on customer service,
then share this document with your employees. Now that’s the easy part. The
harder task is getting them to live it, and there is no one way to do that.
Translating your vision of a customer-centric
company culture into an actual one takes a lot more than just telling people
what you want. Sure, you’ll want to remind them regularly through special
events and workshops, but much more importantly, you’ll have to build it into
the workflow. Then it simply becomes an automatic part of the everyday efforts,
where practicing over and over makes it perfect.
A culture built to last: Again, you won’t get very far with a
30-page customer service document
or by simply shouting your philosophy from the company rooftop. Cultures that
last are built to last from the ground up, and so you’ll need to consider the
workflow, the processes, the hiring process (how you hire the right people,
that is), the training you give your staff, and so on.
Get better every day
Winning a new customer is quite a challenge
for every business that operates within a normal competitive landscape- it is
simply no easy task. Ensuring those customers stay with you however is a much
easier task, usually all that is needed is to continue providing a strong
overall customer experience.
The point is that you want to do everything
you can to keep those customers you worked so hard to secure in the first
place, and part of that is by being a customer-centric firm from the ground up.
By following some of the tips in this article, you should enjoy longer-term and
more profitable client relationships.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/344351
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